


Years We Spent Parting

by intrikate88



Category: The Americans (TV 2013)
Genre: Blatant Theft of Foliage, Christmas, Cold War, F/M, Family Feels, Post-Canon, Soviet Union
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 11:36:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17043005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: Several years after the winter they ran, Elizabeth makes an unexpected request and Philip thinks about the past.





	Years We Spent Parting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amoama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amoama/gifts).



> Title from a stanza of Anna Akhmatova's "Parting"-
> 
> Not weeks, not months- years  
> We spent parting. And now finally  
> The chill of real freedom  
> And the gray garland above the temples.

Elizabeth cut potatoes for soup in the tiny kitchen of their Moscow apartment when she broke the silence and asked Philip, “Can we get a Christmas tree?”

He lowered his newspaper to look at her. “What?” He furrowed his brow. He had more wrinkles now, and so did she. Age and some its pains seemed to rush in quickly, after they retired from active operational work. “You never even liked Christmas.” 

They had only really celebrated the holiday, any holidays, after the kids were born; being a regular family with photos of Baby’s First Christmas was worth starting to do, even if it hadn’t ever become elaborate as many of the families around them had. No shows of lights hung from the gutters, and only a modest pile of practical presents were under the tree, placed there a week before the day with no surprises. When Henry was seven, he had complained, asking if this was all the presents they were going to get, when his friends got way more. Elizabeth had spent the rest of the day in a sour mood, leaving everyone uncomfortable and unsettled, even though the kids didn’t know why beyond their father gently admonishing them to be grateful for what they had. Henry hadn’t asked that again, but the sense that it wasn’t worth trying to make it a big day hung over Christmas every year after that. The tree and the wreath on the door were always gone days before New Year’s.

Without looking at her husband, Elizabeth picked up the cutting board and swept the potatoes into the pot on the stove. “It’s not about that,” she said. 

They didn’t speak about it again that night. Elizabeth went to sleep quickly, but Philip lay awake, watching the minutes turn into hours on the clock on the nightstand and leaving him with a diminishing chance of getting sleep before work at the university the next day. Luckily he only had to focus on paperwork as a travel administrator; some days he instructed English language classes, and trying to keep students from speaking Russian for an hour could be a challenge. (He sympathized with them. Sometimes it was hard not to revert to English; it wasn't that he had forgotten Russian, not at all, but it was the language of his childhood and adolescence, the language he had spoken to his mother and his friends, not the language of being a man with a house and a wife and children and an office to go to, and few friends beyond the FBI agent he could only discuss one of those lives with. When it was just him and Elizabeth, though, switching between English and Russian just happened. And sometimes they were Philip and Elizabeth, sometimes they were Mischa and Nadyezhda. What was any of it besides words that someone had made up, anyway?)

Arkady Ivanovich had had a hell of a time finding them a place to lay low after bringing them back to Moscow in the midst of KGB turmoil that Elizabeth had failed to help nurture into an outright coup; there had been some talk of assigning the two of them to another posting; one in Berlin, perhaps, or Czechoslovakia. A year after they’d come back, Germany had reunited and the KGB office in Berlin became mostly a pile of ashes that used to be an exhaustive collection of surveillance. But by then, several officials involved in that first aborted insurrection had resigned, or had heart attacks, and the danger to them subsided. Elizabeth had been able to actively work as a trainer, then, after months of boredom translating reports in a mostly forgotten office outside of the Kremlin headquarters. 

She had pointedly refused to complain about her work in a way that set Philip’s teeth on edge. It was clear that she resented having to sneak home like some kind of criminal, and be sentenced to drudgery for all her years of dedicated service to a country she believed in so utterly, but she wouldn’t say it, not even to him, not even when all they truly had was each other. They were in a place where everyone had a job, nobody was unemployed, and that was what mattered, she said, when he pushed and asked her to just admit she hated it, after six months. He never knew if she had complained to Arkady Ivanovich instead, asked him for something else like Philip had asked to trade for a smaller apartment where they wouldn’t have to live with another family, soon after their return. He doubted it, though: he would believe that someone was convinced Elizabeth’s skills were being wasted sooner than her allowing herself to express dissatisfaction at what she had come home to. 

But now she was training the newest teenagers in the skills they would need to continue fighting a covert war that wasn’t meant to have any real end. He tried not to think about how those young future agents were no older than Paige, or Henry. Back in August, she had taken her students north to the Medveditsa River on a wilderness survival camping trip for a week, as if they were still Young Pioneers going to summer camp; only Philip had known what she whispered to him under the cover of the radio playing, that the KGB was trying to do again what they had tried to do in ’87, and remove Gorbachev. When operatives were advancing on a dacha in Crimea, she was making teenagers fish for their dinner. 

And now, four months later on an ordinary Wednesday, Philip slipped out of the apartment before dawn, walking briskly in the December cold to a nearby hotel that had replaced its landscaping earlier in the year. Keeping an eye out for any watchers, Philip found a spot that had no visibility from the street and quickly uprooted a pine of some sort, more a bush than a tree, and shoved it into a grocery bag. It was small enough to stow under his jacket and zip it up, while covering the odd lump it made with his scarf. Again making sure that nobody on their way to work might have seen him, he switched out the knitted cap he’d worn for one in a different color, and headed back to the apartment.  

It was probably the most sneaky theft he’d done in almost four years, and he felt silly for the way his heart raced over stealing some damn foliage. 

When he got back, coffee was brewing and Elizabeth was out on the balcony, wrapped in a coat and smoking as she looked out over the city. She’d cut back after changing jobs, but never quit entirely. Trying not to alert her, Philip unzipped his coat and took the bag out, pulling a mixing bowl from the top of the refrigerator on his way to their living room. 

Elizabeth came back in as he was trying to prop up the little tree in the bowl on a table, using two books to keep it from falling over. “You got me a tree,” she said.

He let it stand on its own, and turned to look at her, standing there awkwardly. “It’s… well, it’s not much of a tree. Not like we used to get.” He looked at his feet. “You never ask for anything, really, so I wanted—“ She interrupted him with a fierce hug, burying her face in the scarf he was still wearing, and he wrapped his arms around her, and kissed the top of her head.

Just as abruptly, she released him without a word and pushed past him into the bedroom, where he heard a drawer scrape open. A minute later, she brought back a few pieces of cheap jewelry, some paper and scissors, and the three pictures they had of Paige and Henry. 

And that morning, the morning of what would be American Christmas (though the Orthodox one was nearly two weeks away, not that they would celebrate it, and New Year’s Day was not yet there), Philip poured them both coffee and they decorated their tiny tree as well as they could, with earrings and a cut-out paper star and the small laminated photos that were all they had of the children they had left behind four years before. Philip pulled Elizabeth into an embrace, and felt wetness seep through his sweater, though she didn’t make a sound. It was nothing like any of the Christmases of years past, when Henry begged to get a computer for the family or Paige grumbled about having to water the tree, while Philip and Elizabeth felt especially alienated from a culture they didn’t quite fit into. It hadn’t meant all that much, just another chance for capitalists to convince people to buy things they didn’t need (or so Elizabeth said, while Philip not-so-secretly enjoyed the variety of cookies and buying presents, even if he did agree with her in abstract principle.) 

This, though— this meant something. 

After work, they drank tea and ate cabbage rolls for supper, sitting on the couch next to their tree as the clock struck seven and the news on the television turned over to a special announcement from Gorbachev. Philip’s mouth dropped open as he said, "Compatriots . . . I am ceasing my activities as president of the USSR.”

“It’s over,” Elizabeth whispered as the speech read from a piece of paper went on. “I knew there was pressure, that… but it’s _over_.” 

“There’s always been pressure,” Philip said. “I didn’t think he’d actually _do_ it.”

Elizabeth sat up straight to look at him. “Do you think the Americans will actually open up diplomatic relations? That they’d let Paige and Henry come here?" 

“I don’t know,” Philip said, and wiped at his eyes, emotional just as much because of the possibilities and at how she had jumped to something hopeful first. “I don’t even know who we’d ask.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” said Elizabeth, and they watched as the broadcast was cut off and the sound of sirens and then bells outside broke the silence, as a new world began without the pomp and circumstance such a thing would merit, and out the window, the Russian flag was raised into the night sky. 

**Author's Note:**

> Amoama, I hope you enjoyed this bit of Elizabeth and Philip's lives at a time that would probably have been very significant for them. 
> 
> Gorbachev was really considerate in being seasonal with his resignation, as if he knew I'd feel like nailing a Christmas story all these years later, although really I also would have accepted the 1993 constitutional crisis or when START entered into effect just as seasonally if they were there. Any errors in detail or tone I'm blaming on the decades the Jennings spent in America absorbing all sorts of other things, since I know anyone would save festivities for the New Year's celebrations, and as for the mention of communal housing, I don't know if it was still a thing in Moscow in 1988 since everyone I know who was in the USSR then was either a visiting scholar or living in Siberia or Central Asia, in places where sharing your apartment with other families was definitely and uncomfortably a thing. And also, I didn't find a way to fit in Elizabeth's reaction to Gorbachev's Pizza Hut commercial in 1997, but I'm sure she regretted not getting rid of him when she had the chance, you know? The pizza seems like some sort of last-straw moment for someone like Elizabeth. 
> 
> Happy Yuletide and С наступающим Новым Годом!


End file.
